Medication errors for orally-administered or injectable medications are a common occurrence in both in-patient and out-patient settings. As the population ages and treatment therapies become more sophisticated, medication regimens are becoming more complex and demanding. Further, it is often necessary to implement an iterative process in which dosages and dosage schedules are modified until a desired therapeutic effect is achieved. This process is hampered by the fact that most medications are only available with set dosage levels, which limits the variations possible. For example, an ideal dosage may be outside of the set dosage levels. Also, considerable waste may be entailed in the iterative process, since as dosage levels are modified, the remaining medications with previous dosage levels are no longer usable and are discarded.
Often medication is dispensed in pill form, requiring patients to count out pills and take a large number of pills at one time. If a dosage for a particular medication is changed, any remaining pills of the medication in the previous dose must typically be discarded, resulting in considerable waste and extra expense. Further, considerable destructive variance in schedule and dosage may occur in a self-administered environment. For example, the numbers of pills a patient takes and when the patient takes the pills are typically the responsibilities of the patient to understand and implement. Thus, a patient may take an incorrect dosage (too few or too may pills) or take a correct dosage at an incorrect time (to close to or too far from a previous dosage).
Prescription orally-administered medications in liquid form are not typically made available to individual patients or even to medical care facilities, such as clinics and hospitals, at least because such mediations are typically quite concentrated and the means for storing and accurately metering such medications in a patient or medical care facility are not available.
It is known to control dosages of intravenously administered medications, for example, using an infusion pump. However, the administration of orally-administered medications is generally restricted to liquid medications and pills available only in fixed dosage levels, and the administration of injectable medications is restricted to dosages available in fixed levels or to a manual process of extracting a medication, for example, using a syringe to extract a liquid medication from a bottle of the medication, and determining by eye when a desired amount of the liquid medication has been extracted. For injectable medications, measuring is typically done using a scale on the side of the syringe, with tick marks indicating 0.1 ccs or 0.1 mL, with a typical accuracy of +/−0.1 mL. Most dosages are rounded numbers, for example, 10 cc. Therefore, dose variation in routine nursing is in the 1-10% range. Medication concentrations tend to be calibrated to support 1-10 cc measurements.